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Mitt Romney and the myth of GOP populism

Ever since McCarthy, the GOP has had its anti-elitist, anti-intellectual wing, the author writes. | AP Photo

By NEAL GABLER | 9/23/12 9:44 PM EDT

Mitt Romney’s indiscreet comments at a May fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., about how 47 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes and suck at the national teat, may wind up being just another bump in a rough campaign season. But they may also turn out to be a seminal moment for the Republican Party — when it finally blew its populist cover.

The Republicans used to be the party of business, of Midwestern Main Street virtues, of Rotarians and Elks and Lions. It was the party of the folks Sinclair Lewis depicted in his novels. It was white, male, square, industrious, self-reliant, dull. Just look at its presidential candidates in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey. They were all cut from the same plain cloth. They weren’t populists or rabble-rousers. The Republicans left that to the Democrats. They appealed to Middle America — and liked it that way.

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But all that changed in the postwar era, after 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s main contribution to Republicanism may seem to have been his strident anti-communism, but one could make a case that anti-communism was a beard for McCarthy’s deeper passion: anti-elitism.

McCarthy derided the “men in the striped pants” of the allegedly communist-riddled State Department, as Eastern-educated eggheads, like most of FDR’s Brain Trust. McCarthy’s war wasn’t just against supposedly communist agents. He was against all those government planners, haughty bureaucrats, effete Ivy Leaguers who seemed to think that they were better than everyone else. His campaign slogan in 1946, before he discovered anti-communism, was: “Tired of Being Pushed Around?” When his Democratic senatorial opponent that year said that he was a university professor, McCarthy sneered, “I’m no professor — just a farm boy.”

Ever since McCarthy, the GOP has had its anti-elitist, anti-intellectual wing. The mantra of which has been: They hate you. “They” being the Democrats, who were in league with the professors and planners. This seed, planted by McCarthy, has grown a political sequoia. As Rick Perlstein documented in his brilliant book “Nixonland,” “They hate you” became the basis of Nixonian politics and the force that shifted the nation’s political geology for the past 50 years.

Long before there were Reagan Democrats, there were Nixon Democrats — his silent majority who hated smarty-pants people and their sense of cultural and intellectual superiority. Like McCarthy, Richard Nixon came by this honestly. He had been stung by that elite East Coast contempt when he was a young man, and he built a powerful politics of resentment out of his personal wounds. Nixon’s political genius was in understanding that many Americans would connect to this kind of anger — because they had felt disrespected, too.

Readers' Comments (44)

FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ON CBS: OBAMA WINS HANDS DOWN. THIS DEBATE MAKES IT VERY CLEAR WHY ROMNEY IS THE WRONG PERSON TO LEAD AMERICA AT THIS TIME IN ITS HISTORY. ROMNEY HAS NO SENSITIVITY TO THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL CONTRACT--JUST SELFISH INDIVIDUALISM AND THE WELFARE OF THE RICH. AMAZINGLY NARROW VISION! That man will never occupy the white house.

Good analysis. Ever since Nixon's "Silent Majority", Republicans have conned a significant percentage of working Americans into voting against their own interests and in favor of the Wall Street elite, by waving the red flags of school prayer, gay marriage, flag-burning, whatever, and distracting voters from where the money was going.

Throw the middle class a hundred-dollar tax cut to distract them from the million-dollar tax cuts for millionaires - it worked surprisingly well for a while.

But Romney can't even pretend to Bush's fake-cowboy regular-guy style, he simply doesn't know how anyone middle-class might think or act, so he can't sell the populist facade.

If the 47% who live in red states and have been voting Republican since Reagan really wake up this year, the GOP is really going have to come up with a whole new strategy.

So what Romney did at that Florida fundraiser matters because he ripped off that Republican populist mask to reveal the elitist underneath.

That's why the 47 percent gaffe is so damaging.

It revealed Romney's contempt for those he views as society's moochers, known to most as hard-working and retired Americans.

By comparison, in Barack Obama's comparable private-fundraiser gaffe, Obama talked about the importance of talking with the embittered white folk who cling to their guns and religion.

Nixon and Reagan knew which buttons to push to appeal to lunchbucket Democrats. Today's Republican Party relies on anti-immigrant resentment and a pale echo of the red scare tactics it has used since FDR.

47% of Americans are not paying taxes. Some of them are wealthy freeloaders with healthy expense accounts. Some of them are able bodied but lazy welfare recipients. Some of them are disabled. What Romney stated was that these people will vote for Obama no matter what he says, so he can't afford to waste time and money trying to convert them to his team. The people who are not paying taxes now are scared stiff that Romney will win, because he has promised to cut back unnecessary entitlements, and simplify the tax code. The laws are all messed up. People who are disabled are afraid to try to work for fear of losing their benefits. Welfare recipients tell their daughters to get a baby or leave home. The government dole system has hurt the poor by robbing them of their need for education, their creativity and entrepreneurism, their self-esteem and their god given right to pursue happiness. Obama will keep the poor dependent on government handouts, and the rest of the country staggering under the combined weight of government regulations and oppressive taxation. Romney will revolutionize the tax code, free the poor from addictive government pity handouts, remove regulations that cripple small businesses, and make America great again.

Interesting article but the author fails to mention Nixon's "southern strategy". Racial politics was the undercurrent in Nixon's 1968 campaign. Whatever overt populism that the republican party used it was focused on white's who were concerned about crime, bussing, and other topics with racial overtones. I agree that Romney has damaged, somewhat his outreach to the white working class Reagan Democrats, but I doubt it will be as severe as the author states.

47% of Americans are not paying taxes. Some of them are wealthy freeloaders with healthy expense accounts. Some of them are able bodied but lazy welfare recipients. Some of them are disabled. What Romney stated was that these people will vote for Obama no matter what he says, so he can't afford to waste time and money trying to convert them to his team. The people who are not paying taxes now are scared stiff that Romney will win, because he has promised to cut back unnecessary entitlements, and simplify the tax code. The laws are all messed up. People who are disabled are afraid to try to work for fear of losing their benefits. Welfare recipients tell their daughters to get a baby or leave home. The government dole system has hurt the poor by robbing them of their need for education, their creativity and entrepreneurism, their self-esteem and their god given right to pursue happiness. Obama will keep the poor dependent on government handouts, and the rest of the country staggering under the combined weight of government regulations and oppressive taxation. Romney will revolutionize the tax code, free the poor from addictive government pity handouts, remove regulations that cripple small businesses, and make America great again.

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You just don't get it, do you? No wonder Romney is going down in flames, and taking the GOP with him. Thank god for both.

Sep 18, 2012 01:48 PM EST UPDATE: The number of people who have taken the CNBC poll has doubled, bringing those who agree with Romney's comments to 76 percent.

As the faux outrage over Mitt Romney's "47%" comments continue to barrel through the airwaves of the old media, a CNBC poll shows 75 percent of voters believe Mitt Romney was right when he said Obama supporters will vote for him no matter what due to dependence on the government.

No, the poll isn't scientific, but it is an indication of the media running with a narrative opposite of what the country actually believes...again.

While 47% pay no income taxes every American Working stiff pays payroll taxes at a rate of 13.25% of every dollar they earn.....a rate that is not very different than Robmey's 14% on 20 mill income .....Mittens does not pay a fica !

There are no refunds or adjustments on the FICA that is paid on every dollar of pay up to $106,000

The income tax is about 44% of what the fed takes in.......THE FICA IS 37%

That 47% of our great country are freeloaders if a story the GOP loves to tell but it is a LIE !!

This is the start of Romney's new week. Need healthcare ?Just use the ER. Really? Romney is just an ingrained ult ra-rich man who has lived no other life and cannot fathom what it means to be poor. He considers himself and his wife above the crowd. He is blind, deaf and dumb when it comes to empathy and understanding that ordinary hard working people have the right to living a decent life with real healthcare. He fired thousands to make his millions with no understanding the he was destroying families. It's all just spreadsheets to him...... and Ann wants us to stop picking on him. Perhaps she would like to have us wash his feet

You just don't get it, do you? No wonder Romney is going down in flames, and taking the GOP with him. Thank god for both.

Get what? You don't seem to refute any of his points. Seems like a relatively fair breakdown of what the 47% of non-federal taxpayers is composed of. You seem to think that presidencies can be operated purely on the fumes of populism, which - to an extent - is a relatively fair assessment. However, once the revealing truths of images finally shatter the glass from which they are composed, where exactly are all of us at the end of the day?

We have a national debt this is beyond anything any nation has ever experienced, covered by the fact that spending has gone up in this administration by a wee amount, except that counts TARP as a baseline for spending which was supposed to be single-term. We're pushing an agenda on energy that looks to the green markets to get us moving though they require heavy subsidation to be profitable. We have a muddled foreign policy that is now starting to backfire on us. Our inability to recognize that government cannot create wealth in the form of jobs still personally astonishes me to this day. We are approaching the brink of a disaster and are perfectly content to believe that it's not there.

The country will be remade, one way or another. There's really only two choices at this point: Remove the aristocracy of permanent politicians that care only for pushing their personal agendas and the glories of being in office; or at the point of a sword when a dictatatorial board is in place to demand the public does what it wishes.

SkepticalCicada: Sep. 24, 2012 - 8:58 AM EST

Why does Politico continue to mix spin by partisan hacks--of both parties--in with its legitimate reporting?????

Because they need to feed the trolls for advertisement and push an agenda that is left-friendly. Anyone with objectivity has given up on gaining any decent information from Politico articles long ago. Why CSPAN continues to quote Politico articles and polls for their daily stories is beyond me.

Neal Gabler is the author of “Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” He’s working on a biography of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy

Will be a glowing remiscence of an established political family, which Democrats generally 'despise', I'm sure.

The premise of the argument is to the support the notion that somehow being an intellectual elite is somehow the desired end outcome of individual people and individual parties. Unfortunately for them, the intellectual track record over the centuries has been poor, to say the least. Most of what they have claimed either has not come to pass or has been a self-fulfilling prophecy, such as the Frankfurt Institute's insistence that Marxism was an inevitability instead of an aberration. Clearly they were correct, as it was instituted in feudal Russia as opposed to the civilized societies of the time, and it worked out wonderfully in the end, did it not?

In reality, however, do the intellectual really like individuals or do they just like 'people', the statical group? Rarely have I seen intellectuals care about anyone or specifically target an individual to judge their opinion on how they feel in response to a given stimulus (such as a bill crafted to support them). In truth, most intellectuals seem to think far too highly of themselves for what Sowell referred to as the 'focused special knowledge' that gives them license to pontificate on areas they do not understand or have expertise in. That is left to the 'mundane', or the everyday, as most of us refer to it.

In a sense, the author is correct, Conservatives are increasily more hostile to intellectuals and the ideas they generate. However, this is not due to some anti-intellectual sentiment built up by a single - or group - man in the party, but instead by the intellectuals undermining their own authority by their inability to give up notions that do not work in the real world and when applied lead inevitably to disaster. When questioned on the failure of their work, they dismiss the critcism as trite and non-complex, and will invent yet another application in a different context that is 'guaranteed' to work.

As I once heard best put - "The love of theory is the root of all evil".